(NaturalNews) There is a reason why antidepressants have become the third most commonly prescribed class of medications in the US, and it has nothing to do with their supposed efficacy (antidepressants do not actually work). According to a recent study published in the journal Health Affairs, nearly 80 percent of antidepressant drugs administered today are prescribed to people who do not even have psychiatric conditions.

Upon conducting a formal review of prescription practice data, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Bloomberg School of Public Health discovered that the vast majority of people receiving antidepressants today do not even get them from a psychiatrist. And in many cases, doctors are prescribing them for off-label purposes at the prompting of the drug companies that produce them -- and the trend is getting worse.

"Between 1996 and 2007, the number of visits where individuals were prescribed antidepressants with no psychiatric diagnoses increased from 59.5 percent to 72.7 percent," said Dr. Ramin Mojtabai, associate professor at JHU and lead author of the study. "[A]nd the share of providers who prescribed antidepressants without a concurrent psychiatric diagnosis increased from 30 percent of all non-psychiatrist physicians in 1996 to 55.4 percent in 2007."

Many NaturalNews readers will recall the 2010 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which revealed that antidepressant drugs do not even work for most people with clinically-diagnosed depression anyway (http://www.naturalnews.com/028498_antidepres...).

So between not actually working and being prescribed to people that do not need them in the first place, antidepressants can be one of the biggest medical frauds in modern medicine.

If this is not bad enough, another recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health reveals that many pharmaceutical drugs do not work as claimed. Newer drugs tend to provide little-to-no benefits over older ones and only harm patients, which ends up locking patients into a perpetual cycle of having to take new drugs to fix the problems caused by all their other drugs (http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content...).